Friday, 10 March 2017
Sunday, 26 February 2017
‘Moonlight’ wins best picture Oscar…Read full details
The mistake — only corrected after the producers of “La La Land” had come on stage to accept the award — was a stunning end to the film industry’s biggest night.
Vía Uzomedia http://ift.tt/2l1TpbO
Friday, 24 February 2017
Russian writer sparks war of words by joining Ukraine rebels…Read full details
Russian writer Zakhar Prilepin gives a press conference to present his new book "Platoon. Officers and rebels of Russian Literature" in Moscow on February 21, 2017.<br />Natalia KOLESNIKOVA / AFP
One of Russia’s best known novelists, Zakhar Prilepin, has sparked a bitter row among top writers by revealing he is now fighting with pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine.
Prilepin is acclaimed for novels drawing on his experiences of serving with Russian forces in Chechnya and as a member of a banned radical nationalist group, and has won some of Russia’s top literary awards.
The shaven-headed writer has been a frequent visitor to the rebel east Ukraine since the start of the conflict in April 2014, acting as a “consultant” to Donetsk rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko.
In an interview with popular tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda last week the 41-year-old revealed he is now the deputy commander of his own battalion, shocking the literary scene.
“I think a writer has a right to any position,” Prilepin said at a midweek Moscow news conference.
“He can stand with a flag saying peace to the world or he can take up arms.”
– ‘Deserves hatred’ –
For Prilepin, the conflict in Ukraine has seen a major change as he has gone from a member of a banned group fiercely opposed to the Kremlin to supporting the official line.
He was part of the outlawed National Bolshevik Party led by fellow writer Eduard Limonov, which used to see its illegal rallies crushed by riot police, but then supported Moscow’s seizure of Crimea in 2014.
By becoming one of the most high-profile Russians to join east Ukraine’s fighters, Prilepin has prompted outpourings of bile from top literary figures with more liberal views.
Viktor Pelevin, one of the best known post-Soviet writers, wrote on Facebook: “When your books are shit, you have to earn money from terrorism.”
Meanwhile Dmitry Bykov, a poet and writer known for an award-winning biography of Boris Pasternak, told Gazeta.ru that “Prilepin deserves hatred.”
In a comment reported by state television, Vera Polozkova, one of Russia’s best known young Russian poets, wrote on Facebook that she “will open a bottle of the best champagne when they finally blow his… head off.”
“The country’s blogosphere is buzzing. It has divided into factions: those who are for Prilepin and those who are against,” wrote Life News website.
Prilepin said the reaction came as as a surprise but he welcomed the fact it had “put writers back on the newspaper front pages.”
A German literary agency has reportedly dropped Prilepin over his role fighting with separatists who are called “terrorists” by Kiev.
“I live in the context of Russian literature. It’s much more important to me what Tolstoy and Dostoevsky would say and think about me than what the current European hypocrites will say,” he responded.
– ‘Deadly risks’ –
Prilepin is taking time out from the military campaign to present a new book — called “Platoon: the officers and rebels of Russian literature” — which tells the story of famous writers who took up arms including national poet Alexander Pushkin.
Prilepin compared himself with the likes of Leo Tolstoy and Mikhail Lermontov, who fought as soldiers and drew on the experience in their writing.
He even went so far as to say he could see such figures joining him in the rebels’ self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic.
While his involvement with the rebels has set off literary skirmishes back in Moscow, Prilepin admits that he faces far more real dangers on the ground in east Ukraine.
In recent months, several rebel battalion commanders have been assassinated in violent attacks inside the rebel-controlled region, killings Prilepin blamed on “various sabotage groups”.
The rebel leadership says Ukraine was behind the deaths, while Kiev insists they were down to either infighting or score settling by the insurgents’ puppet masters in Moscow.
“I want to live, I like living,” he said, while adding: “Why hide it or beat about the bush, there definitely are risks.”
Vía Uzomedia http://ift.tt/2l9LPHa
Erdogan biopic to hit screens ahead of referendum…Read full details
Turkish director Hudaverdi Yavuz poses during an interview on February 4, 2017, in Istanbul. A new film about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is due to hit cinema screens weeks before an April referendum on whether to boost the president's powers. "Reis" ("The Chief") stars well-known Turkish actor Reha Beyoglu as the Turkish strongman and shows his life up to 1999, beginning with the president's childhood in a poor district of Istanbul to his rise to become the city's mayor.<br />BULENT KILIC / AFP
A new film about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is due to hit cinema screens weeks before an April referendum on whether to boost the president’s powers.
“Reis” (“The Chief”) stars well-known Turkish actor Reha Beyoglu as the Turkish strongman and shows his life up to 1999, beginning with the president’s childhood in a poor district of Istanbul to his rise to become the city’s mayor.
Turkish actress Ozlem Balci plays his wife Emine while child actor Batuhan Isik Gurel plays Erdogan as a boy.
The movie, the first ever feature film about Erdogan, will be released on March 3 across Turkey before the Turkish public vote on whether to approve an executive presidency on April 16.
Beyoglu, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the younger Erdogan, delivers passionate one-liners in the trailer, including “a person dies only once, if we die, let us die like a man!”
The actor told Kanal D broadcaster this week he was “proud” when Erdogan said he could see his younger self in Beyoglu.
For Hudaverdi Yavuz, the film’s director, he wanted to tell Erdogan’s life because it was “really interesting” and the film’s title came from the name Erdogan has long been known by.
“When he got elected mayor of Istanbul, automatically people used the word ‘Reis’ (chief)… His childhood friends, his acquaintances, they call him that,” he told AFP.
Questions have been raised over the film’s timing so close to the referendum — it had been due to come out in March last year — but Yavuz said he had no control over the distribution date.
– ‘Not propaganda’ –
Erdogan, the most powerful Turkish politician since founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, became president in 2014, but the role has usually been more ceremonial.
Under the new constitution, the president would have strengthened executive powers to directly appoint top public officials including ministers.
The director hit back at claims of election propaganda ahead of the referendum: “This film is absolutely ours. This is not propaganda,” adding there was no outside intervention.
“For some, my film can have a political meaning, for others it can be a burden, that is not my problem.”
Yavuz, who has previously worked for state broadcaster TRT channel, said the film producers did not seek Erdogan’s authorisation nor did they have to.
The film ends before the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) Erdogan co-founded won power for the first time in 2002 because the director said he wanted to finish “on a beautiful note”.
One key moment in the picture appears to be Erdogan’s period of imprisonment after he recited a poem deemed to be Islamist while mayor of Istanbul, a term still remembered by his supporters as a symbol of the unfair treatment of pious Muslims at that time.
Erdogan served four months in jail from March 1999 over the poem that was regarded as incitement to religious hatred. The trailer shows him cheered by supporters as he prepares to enter jail.
The movie was filmed in Istanbul and Cyprus over six weeks, Yavuz said.
Turkish audiences in Europe including Germany, France and Britain will also have the chance to see the film, local media said.
– ‘Brave hero’ –
In a teaser shared online, a young boy — not Erdogan — watches his grandfather physically beaten for reciting the Islamic call to prayer in Arabic. It was only allowed in Turkish until 1950 after it was banned in Arabic in 1932.
Demonstrating Islam’s strength against the secular military, the young boy begins to recite the prayer in Arabic after he sees the violence.
Another clip highlighting the military’s treatment of the pious includes one scene from September 1961 when a man — the child who recited the prayer — is taken away by soldiers as he is praying.
It begins with a young Erdogan, who would have been seven, watching as soldiers come to the house of a man who defied the authorities to oppose the execution of then premier Adnan Menderes.
Menderes, who lifted the ban on the Arabic-language call to prayer, was executed in the wake of the 1960 military coup.
The last scene shows Erdogan looking with defiance as the narrator says a “brave hero” will grow up honourable against such oppression.
Vía Uzomedia http://ift.tt/2la50AB
